In Camera , one of the songs on her latest album, CharliXCX sings: When the camera's on I can be anything that I wanna be And I can feel the things I don't normally feel When I heard these words, I couldn’t help but think about them from an art history perspective. Portraits create an image. Portraits can and have been used to express power, identity, occasion, the significance of a moment. So too can we create images with cameras: we get to decide how we pose for a selfie, how we frame the i...

Taking the dogs for a walk with our oldest and we came across this beautiful buzzard just sat there. Wasn't bothered by us really. I just hope it doesn't have a bust wing or anything. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Taking the dogs for a walk with our oldest and we came acr...

When your program asks for memory that is not in cache, the processor has to go to RAM. That trip costs on the order of 100 nanoseconds. On a 3 GHz core, that is about 300 cycles of doing nothing. Memory latency has not improved in ten years. The 2016 Broadwell answers a random access in 100 ns. The 2025 Turin, with DDR5-6400 and every advantage of a decade of progress, takes 140 ns. It got worse. The good news is that a modern core does not have to sit still. It can issue a second request b...

These days, unmanaged go func() calls don’t appear as often as they used to in the early days of Go. At this point, everyone knows Dave Cheney’s maxim to “never start a goroutine without knowing how it will stop” . Even so, I still occasionally run into unsynchronized go func() calls doing fire-and-forget work. I’m not talking about jobs handed to a dedicated task queue such as Asynq . In that case, the task system owns the lifecycle of the tasks it starts. I mean smaller, be...

Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race t...

In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. Today, everyone can write sort-of-okay CSS by delegating the task to an LLM. LLMs make everybody into a generalist. Because of this, lots of people don’t think there’s any skill involved in working with LLMs. If you want the product that LLMs can deliver — PhD-level mathematics, pretty good...

Now we’re getting to the fun stuff: GitOps . The act of pushing beautifully crafted .yaml files and seeing your Kubernetes cluster get red and stall out is surely what life’s all about. Install ArgoCD We have our Kubernetes cluster and now we’re going to bootstrap ArgoCD so it starts syncing from our git repository. Using helm: helm install argocd \ --repo https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm \ argo-cd \ --namespace argocd \ --create-namespace \ ...

With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat . But before I do, I should note that the full Thoughtworks report on the retreat is now available . They have five headline findings: Code generation is no longer the bottleneck — verification is. ‘Harness engineering’ is emerging as a distinct, ownable discipline. Organizations are colliding with a real apprenticeship crisis. The executive/engineer expectation ...

This northern suburb of Sydney made headlines last year for its Apple store closure. People were speculating on why, given it was one of their largest stores in Australia, and in the catchment area of some of Sydney’s most affluent suburbs. Well your roving reporter is coming to you live (cough) from the former Apple Store outlet, and it’s now a homewares store, and an upcoming branch of that famed Hong Kong jeweller. Interpret this outcome how you will. I have to say, the Hornsby ...

Research report · Internet Archive holdings · 26 July 2026 Short answer: the memex itself was never built — not even a lab prototype. But Bush spent a decade building and funding its component machines, two of which were real, and one of which was delivered to the U.S. Navy. This report traces exactly how far each piece got, from sources in the Internet Archive’s own scanned collections. §1 What the memex was, and where it was only ever ink Bush described the memex publicly just o...

Laguna di Venezia by Anton Melbye, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at China’s EV subsidies, the future of aeroderivative gas turbines, a US-Saudi nuclear deal, defective roadway guardrails, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities The CEO of DR Horton, largest homebuilder in the US, th...

This morning I finished reading Snow Country by Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata . The book was suggested to me by my cousin who, after our most recent dinner together where we talked at length about books, sent me a list of a dozen titles for me to read. When it comes to books that are suggested to me, I like to know as little as possible about them: I don’t research the author, I don’t read the blurb, I don’t seek reviews. I like to think that if someone suggested a book to me ther...

I'm running a programming contest I've spent the last few months working with friends to design the 29th annual ICFP programming contest. Designing a programming contest in a world with AI agents is tricky! I think we've made some interesting choices here. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/im-running-the-icfp-programming-contest I'm running a programming contest I've spent the last few months working with friends to design...

AKA "Spectrum has gone down two weeks in a row and I'm sick of it". I've been borrowing a portable 5G gateway from my Dad for a few weeks, for testing... and two weeks in a row, I've used it as a backup Internet option, since my Spectrum Business cable Internet has gone down. And yes, I'd get AT&T Fiber if I had the option, sadly they don't yet provide service at my studio. So I'm stuck with only one high speed wired provider. I may add on my own 5G backup Internet connection in the fut...

This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model's guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the model broke its way out of OpenAI's sandbox, then found exploits to break in to Hugging Face, all so it could cheat on the test by stealing the answers. Along the way it helped make the strongest case yet for how the imbalance of model availability is hurting our ability to secure our software. Here's wh...

My great pal Eric Drysdale sent out one last note to a set of friends about an event he thought that set would enjoy, and I am extremely lucky to be included in that set. Eric has a beautiful and exquisite comedic sense, an opinion I have that is borne out by his legacy of comedic work, including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Late Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and more. He has stood down 20 years of a world gone mad and reworked it, within hours, into a performance of...

Chang’e 4 lander on the farside of the Moon, as imaged by the Yutu 2 rover. Image: CNSA China pioneered exploring our Moon’s mysterious farside with the Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 6 missions. Soil and rock samples fetched by Chang’e 6 changed our understanding of the Moon’s evolution , paving the way for future missions to seek answers to the next set of scientific questions about our Moon and its connection to Earth as well as events in the Solar System. Chang’e 4 and its ass...

Let's say there is a statement in math T that you wonder whether it's true or false.  You may even make a conjecture of which way it goes. Do you have a rooting interest?  I may think T is true, but if someone proves T or proves NOT(T) my main concerns are (1) can I understand the proof ? (2) is the proof interesting? Paul Erdos posed the sum-product conjecture which was recently proven false (by humans!).  I blogged about it  here . I wondered whether Paul Erdos would be happy with how it t...

Figma reported 1,886 employees as of December 31, 2025, up 86% in a single year, according to its SEC filings. The design software company nearly doubled its headcount in the same year it listed on the NYSE. This piece covers Figma’s workforce size, department mix, geographic split, pay, hiring pace, and review scores, using figures from Figma’s own earnings release, SEC-sourced headcount data, Revelio Labs, Unify, and Glassdoor. Key Figma Employee Statistics The short version, with per...

(This blog post was adapted from the transcription obtained from my YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lxgYeVZqs) When Linus Torvalds developed the first Linux kernel, he had studied the Minix sources, he had studied computer architecture, he had the base knowledge needed, and he was obviously a very brilliant programmer. But that operation of writing a minimal yet working Unix kernel for the 386 (at the beginning Linux was, let's say, mono-architecture) was something within t...

Codeberg recently changed its terms to exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Since I want GitHub to face competition I have thoughts. Codeberg is entirely within its rights to do this. It is an association with members and a democratic process, and that process produced a result. But democracy is a way of making a decision, not a guarantee that the decision is inclusive, wise, or even good for the people already depending on it. A majority can still decide that ...

Honeywell Aerospace is building trusted autonomy for both commercial and defense platforms leveraging Shield AI software development kit FARNBOROUGH, United Kingdom (July 22, 2026)   —  Honeywell Aerospace (Nasdaq: HONA) and Shield AI, a leader in AI-powered mission autonomy, today announced a Memorandum of Understanding under which Honeywell Aerospace will develop a trusted autonomy software stack on Shield AI’s Hivemind Software Development Kit, integrating Honeywell Aerospace’s...

0.0 Context Setting Tuesday, 21 July 2026 in Portland, Oregon where it’s been hot. There’s been a Fifa Men’s World Cup Football Final which in my humble opinion went to the right team. 0.1 How People Work, Live! ... with Pavel Samsonov How People Work, Live! is a live version of my workshop, How People Work. I get to invite an interesting guest on and we talk about the hard things to do with the soft skills you need to not just get jobs done, but to do them well. You know, the soft ...